For nearly two decades, the John Carroll School has hosted an annual event for area students called “Lessons of the Shoah,” which is designed to teach kids about the Holocaust and explain to them why the phrase “never again” is so important.
Emily Goodman is the director of Holocaust and Countering Antisemitism Programming with the Baltimore Jewish Council, which co-sponsors the event. She has been assisting with it since she joined the organization around five years ago, and through all of that time, one interaction stands out to her as emblematic of why this event, and others like it, matter so much.
A couple of years ago, the president of John Carroll was discussing being the son of an American soldier who helped liberate a concentration camp. One of the descendants of Holocaust survivors present at the event stood up during the talk and said, “Your father rescued my father.”
It turned out that the man’s father was at the very same camp that the president’s father liberated, and he was freed on that day by those American soldiers.
“The fact that these two people had that connection in this one room was just so amazing,” Goodman said. “To see them hug each other, it was so emotional, and for them to have that bond, it’s something that I can’t even imagine how it must have felt for them. To see that moment was just so meaningful and wonderful.”
On Oct. 28, the event will return to the John Carroll School once again, with buses of high school students from a variety of Baltimore schools coming to John Carroll’s campus in Bel Air for an all-day session of learning about the Holocaust.
A full day of focusing on such a heavy topic is not easy, and the organizers of the event take special care to make sure that these young people can get through it. Goodman said that there is a lot of time spent focused on the stories of ordinary people who have survived the atrocities or, like the son of the liberator, have helped others survive them.
The end of the day is always focused on the same theme: a message of hope and inspiration. John Carroll students read poetry and play music, with those in attendance being reminded that they must take an active role in justice to ensure the Holocaust is never repeated. In addition to these elements of the programming, there are small group discussions, interactive activities and more.
The passing of time has made the organizers’ lives more difficult in terms of getting firsthand accounts of the Holocaust. The school, the Baltimore Jewish Council, The Associated and the Ralph and Shirley Klein Foundation cannot rely on a large number of survivors like they could when the event was founded in 2008, or even 10 years ago.
“Over the years, due to our survivor population aging, we’ve had fewer able to [join us] anymore. So, we’ve really started to call upon the descendants of the survivors, the children and the grandchildren and even the great-grandchildren, to begin telling their family stories for the survivors and their families. That way, these stories can continue to be used as an educational tool, despite the survivors not being able to tell them themselves,” Goodman said.
This year, the event will attract nearly a dozen schools and 300 to 400 students. While the John Carroll School is a Catholic institution, it is committed to Holocaust education.
“They all care deeply about … this difficult history and bringing it to young people at that school, and the school has just been extremely supportive,” Goodman said. “It is a history that affects everyone, not just the Jewish community. And in order for people to learn about the concept of ‘never again,’ it can’t just be the Jewish community that learns about the Holocaust.”
